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> I'd love to go to Japan, for example, but it's a long damned way, you can't even read a lot of the signs, and Japanese addresses are... uniquely formed. Japa
by com2kid 3y ago
> I'd love to go to Japan, for example, but it's a long damned way, you can't even read a lot of the signs, and Japanese addresses are... uniquely formed.
Japan caters very well to American tourists. Plenty of menus are in English, signs to anyplace you need to go will have romanized letters, and on top of that your phone will happily translate a decent % of written text.
Heck lots of countries have English signs all over the place. Since a large % of people with money know English, it has become tourist language of sorts.
> She has a terrible sense of direction and has needed me to walk her three or four blocks pointing out landmarks along the way just to make sure she could get to the nearest pharmacy.
Yeah my wife is the same way, we did just fine in Japan. We stuck together, and as a reminder, phones have maps on them, maps that let you live stream your location to other people. Maps that give turn by turn directions so you can find someone if you get separated.
> So now I need to find a guide or guides that I can hire for a week or two, pay for all their expenses as well as their salary, and at least occasionally navigate a sensible but immense transit system with all sorts of unusual quirks.
No, you just go to Japan and eat really damn good food. This is particularly easy in Japan since restaurants there have 3d sculpted models of the dishes they serve out front. Plenty of restaurants have digital ordering kiosks (and they've had them long before the US did), and you just tap on the picture of the dish that looks yummy. It is pretty damn easy. For the ones that don't have kiosks, you can just point at the miniature of whatever dish you want.
Japan gets over a million and a half visitors from the US every year. Capitalism being what it is, plenty of services have sprung up to ensure tourists who can afford a $2k flight have ways to spend the rest of their disposable income.